Sunday, July 06, 2008

Old BarnsTim Bowling

Starlight especially seems to love them;its fractured brilliance angles inthe broken loftwith so much ease and warmthit's as though the long, golden needlesof a distant harvesthad fallen through the galaxiesin search of home, as thoughsomewhere in the immensity of darknessa wagonload of hay had overturnedand centuries later settled in besidethe swallows' nests and spiderwebslike a living thing that knowswhere it belongs.

This is the power these structures have,the sense of sanctuary they possess;animals sheltered from the stormmen and women laying down their toolschildren dreaming in the lofts...disparate lives and disparate refuge...so the wind plays through these gapslike the collective heaving of a sighthat the very walls accommodateas if to say “we understand.”

And driving by them, autumn nights,splashing their plankswith the milk of headlight beams,I have often felt the urge to turn insideand watch the needles streaming downin crossing lines of pure geometry,the delicate puzzle of time and spacesuddenly woven into an owl's flightand swallowed by the air;but I have rarely stopped:

somehow it seems enough to knowthey still exist, these wooden cavescrowded with their ghosts of early dreamsand honest labour, gatheringthe same slow crop of the starsyear after year, and promisingthese few spilled wagons for us all;a subtle interplay of gold, a little silence,and the corner of a field to vanish in.(from Dying Scarlet, 1997, Nightwood Editions)

Okay, before I say anything else: you probably just noticed that the poem ends with a preposition. Some of you were probably taught that such constructions are no-nos. Ending with a preposition is awkward and inelegent, but not grammatically incorrect. It's no more incorrect than using a phrasal subject, like I did in the last sentence – the phrase “ending with a preposition” was the subject. Awkward, yes, grammatically incorrect, no. And one of poetry's athletic endeavors is to stretch gammar, to make us aware of it by bending the rules, or using them in ways that draw attention to themselves...

Each time I read the poem, I get sluggish toward the end, as if Bowling's getting a little too preachy, a little too pat. Isn't this going to wrap up neatly?, I think. But the thrilling conclusion slightly unbalances the plodding drive toward conclusion that preceeded it. It's precarious, perfect. What a clunker it would have been to end with “in which to vanish” instead!

At 43 lines and 250 words, Tim Bowling's “Old Barns” is quite a bit more dense than some of the poems I've discussed so far. It's got more than twice as many words as Karen Solie's “Dear Heart”; does that make it flabby or inefficient?

Just try truncating it. Here's a summary of the first fourteen lines:

Starlight love barns; it angles inlofts like golden needlesof a distant harvest falling through spaceor as ifa wagonload of hay overturnedand centuries later settled into the barn.

The technical meaning remains, but the conversational tone (more on that in a minute) is gone. But what's most important in these lines, to my ear, is that the gentle image (of light as hay falling through the “galaxies”and where it has “settled in” the barn) is reproduced in the almost weightless line.

The winding roundabout-ness in the first stanza's conclusion is probably an authorial dodge to avoid using “home” twice in one stanza.

Still, “a living thing that knows where it belongs” is gorgeous and somehow – yes – gentle. Indeed, gentle seems to be the dominant mode of the poem, one that a tighter syntax would, I think, have strangled. Watch him string a metaphor over four full lines at the end of the second stanza:

so the wind plays through these gapslike the collective heaving of a sighthat the very walls accommodateas if to say “we understand.”

A lesser poet would have finished with stanza three “I have often felt the urge to turn inside/ and watch the needles streaming down” but not Bowling. Like the chapter endings of the Hardy Boys books I read growing up, stanza three ends with a cliffhanger — “but I have rarely stopped” — left dangling by, and this is an odd choice, a colon. He quietly drives you over that final stanza break with a not-quite-full pause. And it means that, despite the fact that all four stanzas start with full sentences, the final one begins with a lower case letter. In addition to providing a little energy to the stanza break, it also makes that final thought somehow diminutive, less urgent, more spare:

somehow it seems enough to knowthey still exist,

But still the line shivers with meaning. He could be referring to family that's drifting apart. Or a much-loved-but-seldom-returned-to piece of art: a novel from adolescence, a favourite poem tucked away on a shelf, a painting in the Louvre. Why does that provoke guilt?

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I think reading and writing about poems is animportant corollary to the act of composition.Why do you love what you love?A look at 12 Canadian poems: